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THE secret agreement that resulted in David Hicks facing only
nine more months in prison may do fatal damage to an already
discredited system of dealing with terrorism suspects, legal
experts say.

The combination of a sentencing deal arranged behind closed
doors and the conditions imposed on Hicks, including a year-long
gag order and a declaration that he was never tortured, has shown
the process to be a political and not legal one, Australian and US
observers say.

Robert Richter, QC, one of Australia's most experienced criminal
lawyers and a Hicks supporter, said the trial was a sham that had
wholly discredited the Pentagon's war-crimes process.

"The charade that took place at Guantanamo Bay would have done
Stalin's show trials proud," Mr Richter said in a commentary for
The Sunday Age.

"First there was indefinite detention without charge. Then there
was the torture, however the Bush lawyers, including his
attorney-general, might choose to describe it. Then there was the
extorted confession of guilt."

The controversial deal came a day after the US Defence
Secretary, Robert Gates, told a congressional committee in
Washington that tribunal verdicts would lack credibility because of
the reputation of Guantanamo around the world.

A law professor at the University of Richmond in the US, Carl
Tobias, said the "machinations" in the Hicks trial "suggest the
accuracy of Gates's Thursday testimony about global perceptions of
the military trials".

The Hicks deal stunned even the military prosecutors, who were
seeking a much longer sentence. It only emerged later that Colonel
Morris Davis, the lead prosecutor, and his team had been kept in
the dark about negotiations between the Hicks defence team and
Susan Crawford, the Defence Department lawyer who oversees the
tribunals.

Colonel Davis said he had learned of the deal at lunchtime on
Monday, before Hicks's first appearance. The sentence of nine
months shocked him. "I wasn't considering anything that didn't have
two digits," he said.

Colonel Davis said he could have chosen not to sign the papers
but it would have been just a symbolic move.

Maureen Byrnes, the executive director of the New York
organisation Human Rights First, said the Hicks proceedings
"illustrated everything that's wrong with these military
commissions".

"The plea deal in particular has the taint of coerced statements
and secrecy. The deal effectively censors anything Mr Hicks might
allege about what he says he suffered and implausibly characterises
the last five years of his detention as justified under the laws of
war," she said.

Lex Lasry, the Australian QC who observed the tribunal for the
Law Council of Australia, said the conditions attached to the deal
were suspicious. Hicks would be locked away and forbidden to speak
publicly until after the federal election later this year.

"What an amazing coincidence that, with an election in Australia
by the end of the year, he gets nine months and he is gagged for 12
months from talking about it," Mr Lasry said.

A lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, Ben Wizner,
said if Hicks was such a menace to Western security, "why was he
given a sentence more appropriate for a drunk-driving offence?"